


Scattered Ashes

by Eliza_Farrow



Category: BBC Ghosts
Genre: A conversation I think they should have had, An excuse for me to write some thoughts, Cause cap jumps at the bomb with no hesitation, In chapter 2, Set just after 'Redding Weddy', Well - Freeform, after the main story and before they all watch 2001, so I suppose it's missing scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27240925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eliza_Farrow/pseuds/Eliza_Farrow
Summary: 'Behind her frozen smile, Alison's mind swam in dumbfounded shock. Flecks and flickers of ash still rained from the sky, black snow, and scraps of charred stone and compacted earth glimmered up at her with all the dim beauty of jet. Beautiful disaster set on the garden like early frost, even as the heart of the earth smoked faintly from the detonation. It seemed an impossibility that something so violent had occurred in such an apparently tranquil place.'After the wedding planner leaves, Alison finds The Captain to demand answers about the bomb in the garden.
Comments: 44
Kudos: 151





	1. Chapter 1

It took a long time for Claire and Martin to quit fawning over the partially restored garden and take their leave of Button House, during which period Alison silently and fiercely congratulated herself on keeping a smile bright enough to blind firmly stuck to her face. Thankfully, neither the wedding planner nor the prospective bride noticed that the expression in her eyes bordered frantic; Claire was too enraptured with her new venue, and, if Martin noticed anything out of sorts about his hosts, he likely put it down to the stress of the last few hours (not a wholly inaccurate assessment) and a certain desperation to keep anyone from looking too closely at the areas of the garden that were still falling apart. Neither questioned the slight scent of spent powder on the air.

Behind her frozen smile, Alison's mind swam in dumbfounded shock. Flecks and flickers of ash still rained from the sky, black snow, and scraps of charred stone and compacted earth glimmered up at her with all the dim beauty of jet. Beautiful disaster set on the garden like early frost, even as the heart of the earth smoked faintly from the detonation. It seemed an impossibility that something so violent had occurred in such an apparently tranquil place.

But it had, and over and over, Alison watched those scenes in her mind's eye. Claire asked a question, and she responded with some pithy banality that made the young woman laugh, but her thoughts were consumed with its tableaus: Mike standing over a dancing blaze of undergrowth, lighter fluid held loosely as he looked at her in apparent confusion; Mary wreathed in fire, unravaged, but with horror twisting her features in to ghastly shapes; the ghosts crowded about an empty crater, great plumes of smoke billowing from its mouth, empty.

The Captain flinging himself bodily at the explosive...

With all the subtlety at her disposal, Alison scanned the grounds—no ghosts. They had departed to their designated areas of the house to avoid the new guests. Alison liked to imagine the courtesy as penance for the many hundreds of little disruptions they had caused her initially. 

Everything felt surprisingly empty without them. Despite the fact that they occupied no real physical space, the air felt somehow freer in their absence, but in a listless, restless sort of way that suggested it was not sure what to do now that it was no longer host to their endless intangible arguments. For once, Alison was not particularly glad to have them gone; gunpowder vapours were heavy on the wind, and a primal part of her brain, divorced from logic, insisted on having everyone she cared about in one location. It was illogical. It was shock, and it couldn't be dealt with now.

Later. She would drag them all together later, stay during the film tonight, despite the chaos it was certain to be, and be reassured of their safety that way. But it could only be later. For once, she had an opportunity to close a much-needed deal without ridiculous, ghostly interference, and she was far too sensible to squander it, especially on the whim of some baseless concern. 

Her friends were _fine_. It was impossible to harm them, let alone kill them. They were _fine. All fine_.

Mike sidled up to her, still dripping lightly.

"Soooo...are they gone? 'Cause I don't know about you, but I'd _love_ for nothing to go wrong right now."

"They're inside." _They're fine. They're just indoors, they'd come running if you yelled, and then you'd never get rid of them. They're OK._ "We might actually be in with a chance here." Mike pumped his fist, then caught sight of his wife's expression. Enthusiasm dulled to something more concerned.

"You alright?" 

"Yeah, fine! Well, I'm hoping this goes alright, and..." She trailed off; Mike was watching her, eyes all narrow skepticism. Alison did not have the armour of being difficult to read and, to someone who knew her as intimately as he did, her bleeding frustrations were fresh on the surface. He leant closer, in what he imagined to be a conspiratorial fashion; Alison twitched as cold droplets fell from his face to wet the skin beneath her collar.

"So, why _was_ there a bomb buried in our garden?" Alison fought back a sigh. With his usual blunt decisiveness, Mike had cut—or rather sledgehammered—his way to the heart of the matter. She had no idea where to begin explaining her suspicions in a way that seemed rational—how exactly was she meant to say that she thought that The Captain, in one of his typically over zealous fits, had buried some secret scandal alongside a bomb and simply decided not to mention it to anyone, and sound anywhere near sane afterwards? The words _'I'll tell you later'_ were halfway to her lips...

"What's this about a bomb?"

Martin would have made a good ghost. His sudden appearance rivalled Robin's for shock factor and was as completely unwelcome as any of Alison's 'housemates' interjections. Both Alison and Mike jumped guiltily, then stammered over each other in their hurry to make that statement seem somehow nonthreatening, in so much as a bomb can ever be said to be nonthreatening.

"No, no, no, no, it wasn't like that! It was..."

"We were just saying that—"

"The wedding. This wedding will be bomb—" the words sounded incredibly awkward in his mouth, and Mike said them with the expression of quiet disbelief worn by those who can recognise that what they're saying is patently ridiculous, and yet find themselves unable to stop. "—that, that's what we were saying. Yep."

"That's what we're going with?"

"Yep."

Perhaps having collected enough evidence at this point to conclude that the couple were simply always slightly odd, Martin treated the minor slip to a small round of delighted applause: "I. Am. LOVING the enthusiasm here guys! This place is going to be the PERFECT VENUE, I can tell!"

His enthusiasm was not available for questioning, not that either Alison or Mike wanted to dissuade him. Both were silent, smiling silent, as he swept about, bubble-bright and damning, the ecstatic bride-to-be in tow, highlighting his favourite attributes of the garden, wonderfully oblivious to how little of the whole affair was planned. Swept up in the champagne tide of his zeal, Alison felt her peppery anxiety ease somewhat, supplanted by satisfaction at their success— _finally_ success, after so many setbacks—but it didn't fade entirely; it remained there, a cold undercurrent, as she discussed options, haggled prices, cut Mike off before he could make anymore terrible financial decisions, and arranged a million other vital trivialities. She found herself glancing at the window to the kitchen too often, oddly reassured by the grey haze of Fanny as she flitted about inside, watching them. She was, she reflected, probably the only person in the world who could be reassured to find a dead woman watching them. 

**< ~0~>**

At long last, after what seemed to be an eternity of chattering over marquee dimensions and the proper way to arrange streamers to achieve a suitably elegant arc, the interlopers left, and Button House breathed a sigh of relief. No longer standing on ceremony, its usual aura of disaster reasserted itself; the burst pipe began to flow more forcefully for no apparent reason, and Florence's head wobbled from her neck. The distinctive smell of powder grew somehow stronger.

Allison excused herself inside, ducking out while Mike fussed ineffectually with the burst pipe. His distraction, and the time it would take to google a solution, would exempt her from attention long enough to get her wits together and, more importantly, demand some answers from a certain, eternally reticent ghost...

The longer she lived with the dead as her constant companions, the more Alison noticed the fallacies in the expectations the living placed on them. 'Silent as the grave' for example, was pure nonsense; this house was the noisiest she had ever resided in (this list including the flat she lived in during her university years) and the vast majority of its inhabitants were deceased. Sometimes she could understand why The Captain complained so often.

She found most of the ghosts by virtue of her ears (or perhaps it should be said 'at the expense of her ears'). Pat and Robin were arguing about...lizard people? Lizard Queen Elizabeth? Lizard Julian? Alison quickly decided that whatever it was, it was a can of worms that could be opened and put out for the birds another day. Julian and Thomas's voices echoed from along the corridors, bouncing and rebounding in a toneless choir, searching for Humphrey—a rematch? She was beginning to get the feeling she had missed something. But they were undeniably here, and that eased something in her, somewhat.

On her way up to the library, one of The Captain's typical haunts, she walked into Mary, this being, unfortunately, almost a literal description of events as, for reasons best known to her, Mary had crouched down beside a suit of armour. The faint whiff of burning that permanently emanated from her soot-blacked clothes and hair was all that saved them both from a distracted Alison putting her foot through the poor ghost. 

"Oh god, I'm so sorry Mary, I didn't see you down there." Mary peered up at her from between barred fingers.

"That's alright, but shhhhhhhhh! I'm hidings." The ghost shifted, visibly uncomfortable. "Miss Kitty saids a game might makes me feels better, on accounts of that rotten blokes what sets me on fire." It was Alison's turn to fidget, something dawning on her; her neglect of the ghosts today seemed to have caused more issues than it solved.

"You know Mike didn't mean it, right? You were hiding from Kitty—" at this, Mary flapped her hands in a haphazard order for discretion; she was _still_ hiding from Kitty. Poor Kitty, who had just wanted someone to play with. "—and we didn't see you." Mary peered up at her, the glistening whites of her eyes vivid against the greasy smuts on her face, her expression one of cautious glee.

"Do ye mean I was hidings well, then?" Feeling only a mild sense of exasperated despair, Alison assured her that she had been _very_ well hidden, and left Mary to her waiting, the ghost now confident in her ability to beat Kitty at hide and seek. Alison wished her luck.

The library was empty, as it should not have been, but as she had, in a grim, shadowy suspicion, anticipated it being. With a sigh, Alison turned her attention to the attic.

**< ~0~>**

In the time since they had lived there, Button House had taken great strides towards becoming legitimately habitable, going from a rotting edifice from a bygone era, who's main achievement was that it was not yet reduced to rubble by time, to something that looked like it could one day manage to be moderately comfortable. This vast improvement had come at no small price, and a great deal of labour which, consequently, incurred a great deal of noise, much to The Captain's displeasure. After many failed attempts to order and sabotage them into appropriate quiet, the soldier had retreated further and further, until his primary residence was reduced to the confines of the attic, which neither Cooper wanted to deal with. The roof kept the rain off adequately, none of the structuring looked to be in immediate danger of falling apart, and the irritable ghost living there didn't like being interfered with; this was reason enough to stay away.

Because of this, the stairs leading to the attic door were little travelled. Every step was announced in cacophonous fashion, heralded by the sonorous creaks and groans of grievously aged timber. Alison thought this residence suited The Captain rather well, despite his disliking for it; certainly, it was as vocal as he was when unwelcomely disturbed, and all disturbances were unwelcome.

Now that she and the incident were separated by time, her thoughts had cooled and settled from their frantic, adrenaline-high dance. New emotions were beginning to push their way to the forefront of her mind, fluctuating wildly with every step she took towards the one she held murkily accountable for this, and a hundred other minor disasters beside.

Firstly was anger, and perhaps rightly so. Anger at _what_ was a rather more nebulous concept, but she was certain The Captain deserved it for something. Of course, he _had_ mentioned that the secret beneath the garden soil was explosive, but the uncustomary cyriptisism...had she been expected to take him so literally? With so much abruptly at stake, she felt justified in being annoyed by his secretiveness, especially in regards to a project that was, by his own admission, long dead.

Unless it hadn't been the bomb he was desperate to keep hidden. Alison looked up through the slats at the door, an equal distance from her, as she was to the beginning of the stairs. The revolutions of the circular staircase were starting to dizzy her a little, so she paused, glancing about at the delicate lacery of cobwebbing that strew from every protuberance, silken arches furred by what might have been a centuries worth of dust. It was so excessive, it was not even unpleasant, as it transcended her expectations to a degree where she was simply impressed by its existence. Still, it was somewhat difficult to imagine a man as fastidious as The Captain living comfortably in such intense disarray.

If it had simply been a matter of the bomb he wanted hidden, he would have told her, of that she was certain. The fact that he hadn't, the obfuscation and avoidance, meant that the bomb was an after thought, a deterrent. Curiosity boiled in her. What had the meticulous Captain done that required such secrecy? Had it been a photograph of him without his tie? A log submission with an incorrect date? Or was there truly some dark military secret floating about the grounds, it's particulars carbonised, dead but for the word of a ghost. Really, clarification was surely the least she was owed.

Yet, try as she might to fix these things to the wall of her skull, they fell and fluttered away, secondary to one scene, a memory that snagged and didn't let go; Mike stumbling away from the blaze, and The Captain running straight towards it.

Alison halted at the door.

Of course she knew, intellectually, that her housemate were dead, beyond all effects of causality and consequence, but they looked so robustly solid, and acted so humanly, it was easy to forget that they weren't alive.

When she had seen the smoking crater, bereft of the man who had run towards it, she had believed, if only for a second, that The Captain had been blown to bits alongside his secrets. And it had frightened her.

They may not always see eye to eye, or enjoy each other's company in any great quantity, but that didn't mean she wanted to _lose_ him. She didn't want to lose any of her ghosts, much as that thought surprised her. And the willingness with which The Captain had thrown himself at the fire disturbed her. Particularly as he himself acknowledged that he had not been thinking of himself as non-corporeal at the time.

It was not the bomb that annoyed her, nor the damage, nor was it the interest in this sudden secrecy that had compelled her up the stairs. The Captain had worried her, and, in a strangely familial turn, anger was easier to grasp than a sourceless worry. She was here to yell at a dead man for doing something that would have been stupidly dangerous for him to attempt seventy years ago. 

When put like that, it sounded ridiculous, yet her feet, in her concern, would not allow passage back down the stairs until she could verify that he was alright. 

Sighing heavily in exasperation at her own indecision, Alison let her hand rap against the door before the rest of her could change its mind.

A pause. Then a voice from the far side of the door called out for her to enter, and Alison thought that, if he had lost a battle, a campaign, an entire war, The Captain couldn't have sounded more utterly defeated.


	2. Chapter 2

The attic wore its furred pelt of filth like a wolf skin and carried with it an attitude of dark and quiet bitterness. There was a terrible dignity to the place in its sense of expectation; history gathered here, the detritus of a hundred lords and lady Buttons, and under the watchful care of the rafters everything would be silently reduced to dust. All it required was time.

Flurries of this dust swirled through the air in troupes, grey particles performing acrobatic routines in perfect synchronicity, a hundred dancers forever meeting and parting but never touching. It made the world look misty, the rafters ethereal ranks of shadow disappearing into the ether. Light in the attic was golden, but not in the way of sweet summer afternoons, but the way of wax and oil; each shaft of sunlight that pierced through the grime of the windows had a physical presence, a solidity that made the things caught in it look like a painting. Stored furniture and retired treasures loomed strangely, humanoid shapes stretching their long limbs into gnarled contortions, beautiful nonsense figures made of junk. Surrounded on all sides by hollow people, finding something so ephemeral as a spectre should have been impossible. 

And yet Alison instantly knew which shadow was his. It stood by of of the far windows, it's back to her. The outline was unmistakable in the straightness of its spine, the set of its shoulders, and the way that the fading sunlight didn't touch him quite right; it softened the military sharp edges in ways it shouldn't, as though the light sensed his impermanence and was searching for thin spots to poke through. When approached from the side, with The Captain facing the full light of the fading day, Alison could see where the sun stuck its fingers into the threadbare patches in his corporeality; beams of gold pierced his shoulders, segmented his face, and blurred whatever distinguishing features she might have expected to see. It was unmistakably The Captain she stood beside, but never had he looked less tangible.

It looked like he had already been blown apart, then pieced back together. Alison couldn't look at him for long.

They stood in silence for some time, watching each other watch the evening go by. Smoke curled about the house like a wreath.

"I really am sorry about the bomb, you know." Alison hadn't expected him to be the one to speak; as a rule, he was far more comfortable with silenced than she. "Terrible decision really—"

"It's fine," she cut him off automatically then cursed herself for it. It's not. It's not even close to fine. But there were things looming in her mind of larger consequence than merely a hole in the garden. "Why'd you do it anyway?"

"Do what, precisely?" The Captain's voice was tight and defensive, piano-wire tense.

"Didn't peg you as the evasive type. You jumped at that thing in a _heartbeat_ , Captain." And she can't stop the slight bite that seeps into her words, the fear that has sharpened and hardened into anger because she doesn't quite know what to do with it otherwise.

"I am ranking officer, it is my duty to protect you all. In basic training, we were taught—" Alison cut him off, unable to stand the calm in his voice, the tone of absolute rationality such a stark and grating contrast against the restless fears she had been suppressing. He spoke as though she were the one being unreasonable, with a sort of kind patience that made her angrier; the last thing she wanted was to be spoken to as though what he did was normal. The last thing she wanted was a reminder that, for him, it was. The modern world was so thoroughly divorced, on its surface at least, from war and its dark entourage, and seeing the ingrained behaviour inherited from that time treated so casually disturbed her in a way she hadn't thought she was capable. 

It disturbed her to hear that their lives were valued over his.

"I don't care! I don't—we aren't at war anymore, Captain, and I was—" Her words staggered, as even anger failed to push her over the hurdle that is admitting she had been worried, stubborn, wilful pride keeping her silent. "I don't want to watch you die!" Only once the words had left her mouth did she fully recognise their futility, and she stood there, feeling faintly foolish, as the ancient house threw her innermost thoughts back at her in derision.

"Alison, I'm _dead_." she couldn't tell if the mild emotion in his voice was irritation or exasperation, not without his face, but, for a second, Alison had the overwhelming urge to slap the ghost. She dragged in a breath, fully prepared to continue what may constitute an argument, held it for a second, before it broke something inside her chest and deflated into a sigh, taking her energy with it. _"I'm dead"_ —hearing it said so bluntly made her feel blank. Speaking feels infinitely pointless when one speaks against death's enormity, like expecting tears to fill the vacuum of space.

Finally The Captain looked at her. Without the sun to drown him, he looked mortal as ever, eyebrows skewed in askance, lips pressed into a thin, concerned line. It fit, Alison supposed, that they were equally concerned for the other, and equally terrible at expressing it.

"Enough, just...just swear that you'll never do anything like that again." For a long moment, The Captain stared at her, a strange mix of comprehension and confusion twisting his lips. The searching lights in his eyes made her uncomfortable in a way they hadn't before; this was unfamiliar ground, a seriousness they had not dealt with before. In almost every way, her housemates were the antithesis of this, despite the morbidity of their undead condition, and watching one of them match her in this honest severity was surprisingly disarming. Even if it was the one she would most expect it from. "You wouldn't leave me to deal with them all by myself, would you?" Levity, something so usual, so natural, felt like a breath of lead.

Something in The Captain's grey eyes closed off, like the moon disappearing behind a cloud. If the connection had disturbed her before, it did so doubly now that it was broken.

"You'd survive, no doubt. They like you, Alison," he said, surprisingly dismissive, for all he had once railed against the fact. He turned from her and walked, frissons of cobweb passing through him like shadow, to where the light couldn't feel through the patchwork parts of him, and into the dark where he stood like a solid thing. "To them, you're the most interesting thing to happen since, well, Julian. Though," he conceded, "you are far less inflammatory."

That, Alison thought, rather taken aback, was as close as The Captain had come to admitting anything close to approval regarding her. In his own terse manner, this was an admission to appreciation...and an implicit expression of his own discontent. Recognition of his own displacement within the household. It was the validation she had wanted since her relationship with the ghosts, and yet all she could think of was the disorganised chaos. Every success was wan against the glaring fact that, without constant supervision, the ghosts were relentlessly disruptive and, whether she appreciated it or not, Alison was not equipped to keep such constant vigil. Today had proved that, among other things.

"But I'm not _you_ ," she burst out, uncertain of how to make him understand without breaching the razor wire between them. How to tell him he was needed without resorting to saying it. "And neither's Pat. Today was _chaos_ without you. I...I know you don't all always get on, but you all need each other." There was a scoff from the shadows and, with immense care, Alison began to pick her way through history to reach him. Bands of light from the windows lengthened as the sun set, paths that crisscrossed each other in a hundred different ways, but never reached where he stood.

"I hardly 'need' them causing disarray at every turn." It was Alison's turn to scoff. She was not as accomplished.

"Oh come off it, you'd go mad if they weren't around to be shouted at." He did not look terribly convinced. "I know I'd go mad if you weren't here to shout at them." _'I'd miss you'_ was too much for her to say, too difficult a concept for either of them to grapple with no matter its truth, so that was as close as she came, but he had her meaning; The Captain, for all his unending bluster, was well-versed in silence and the unsaid. The tension around his eyes eased a little something a little like surprise, a little like warmth, appearing there briefly, before the strict mask was affixed back in place. 

Amber lit the sky, the world held in suspension, golden and gleaming. It was the sort of light under which everything is beautiful, even things which are truly terrible. Together, the two went back to the window, looked over the garden with the ragged tear in its heart, the shimmer of water from the unfixed pipe, the distant gleaming eye of the lake. Far beyond that, the sunset streaked the distant shores of the horizon with crimson, thin ribbons of cloud dancing in a breeze they couldn't feel to a beat no man could name, their hue ever-changing and wonderful. The silence they stood in was unlike that of before; where that had been tense, starched stiff with all its anticipatory expectation, this was loose, warm. It was the silence of coexistence. Of something one may call friendship.

"I was awarded these after the war, you know," The Captain said suddenly, and the non sequitur shocked her for its honesty. He was lost to thoughts unknown, fingers tracing so lightly over the medals on his breast it seemed he was concerned mere touch would dislodge them, cause them to crumble like ash. "I always wish I'd enjoyed it a little more, the ceremony of it. It was, after all, the last thing that happened before my death." Alison filed that away, along with those few, carefully hoarded details she had gathered about The Captain's life. "But I...couldn't. The people I had known were still gone, and things didn't feel over. It was all I could think of."

The Captain still didn't look at her, spoke to the deepening sky and the inattentive crepuscular creatures flitting across it, and she was glad of his inattention. For what could one say to _this?_ This was not the taciturn man she had anticipated wrestling with on her venture up the stairs, when her best hopes had been that he merely listen to her without argument. This unpeeling of his soul was not something she had anticipated ever having from him, and inspired a tenderness she had felt, at times, for all of her unruly ghosts. It was not a moment where she could offer comfort or counsel; all she could do now was bear witness. 

"I know you all say that the war is over. But it's not. Not really. Not for me." Every word was an obvious difficulty, his expression one of great concentration as he struggled, as she had, to fit what he wanted to say into concise enough phrasing that he did not have to linger on the subject too long.

"I lived to see it end. I lived to see the celebrations, and the ceremonies, but the war was still there. It was there when they gave me my medals, and it was there when I came back to this house...there when I died...

"And it's still happening. I don't know where, or who fights it, or why it's fought, but I can feel it. Somewhere out there, I feel like people are dying—my people—and I can't fix it." One shoulder lifted in a melancholy shrug. "We all did what we could. I keep order here—I can do nothing else."

  
"Have you maybe considered that it's all in your head?" 

"I'm a ghost, Alison," The Captain murmured wryly. "Of course it's in my head; it's got nowhere else to be."

Whatever mood had settled upon him was not yet broken, but the reminder of her presence disrupted it enough that he gave her a brief smile before returning his attention to the sky. Carefully, he placed one hand before the window pane, an approximation of where it would rest if he were able to do such a thing as touch it.

"In a way, I rather liked having the letter there—the blueprints, I mean. Our plans, things with his writing on, his ideas...it was as close to a grave as I could give him. Of course, Havers was worth considerably more than a lock box, but..." He gave a soft, pained laugh, and seemed to come back to himself somewhat, his grey eyes losing their liquid grip of things past. "Forgive me, I seem to be rambling." Alison moved to touch his arm, a physical reassurance of clemency, remembered, and left her hand hovering a scant inch from his sleeve. They remained like that, a living statue and her echo, for a long while.

"You liked him, didn't you? Havers, I mean." Who that was, Alison didn't know, had no way of knowing, but it didn't seem to matter. This moment wasn't hers.

"He was...an excellent soldier, and a good man...he was my friend." And the word 'friend' had such solidity to it, a firm weight she had not heard him attribute to anything. Not war, not his position, nothing; every enthusiasm she had heard from him previously paled against this soft certainty. Whoever Havers had been, he meant more to The Captain than tanks. It seemed an impossibility, but there it was.

At long last, the sun was gone, it's light extinguished. Night was upon the world, in all its infinite grey. Faintly, if one listened close, the rest of the house could be heard, the gradual progression of their bickering moving underfoot. Alison drew a slow breath, suffused it with the pains of the day, and let it go...

"Come watch the film with us." Just like that, normal resumed, if a little to the left of itself. The Captain frowned, something instinctively dismissive already prepared. "I know, I know—you don't really care, and you think someone has to keep watch on the house, but...just forget it. Sit with the rest of us, just for tonight? I'd like that."

The Captain looked at her, surprise in his eyes and a shy smile on the edges of his mouth, then gave a small, swift nod. They left the attic together, as the dust and the open grave sighed their stories into the night.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, I am both a little and a lot later than I had anticipated being, and I apologise for that. Hopefully, this is satisfactory and not some horrendous anticlimax.
> 
> Not vitally important, but my head cannon for the Havers & Captain relationship is that Captain was in love with Havers, but Havers wasn't gay. Sort of like having a gay crush on your best friend and co-worker. The latter was a confession, but not one he ever actually intended to send.
> 
> And one last thing! Facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf) wrote a brilliant work with a similar premise called Without Hesitation, so if you liked this, I highly recommend you check that out!
> 
> Ok, I'm done; any feedback is greatly appreciated!

**Author's Note:**

> So, this show is amazing. Never thought the cast of Horrible Histories would still be together to destroy me emotionally when I'm at uni, but here we are!
> 
> If I've made any mistakes, please let me know. I'll try and get the second part up quickly, so see you then!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [without hesitation](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28854660) by [facingthenorthwind (spacegandalf)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacegandalf/pseuds/facingthenorthwind)




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